"True. It doubtless is charged with matters far more serious than the desires of mere men. Tell me, senorita, what is your dearest wish?" He had bent his head and fixed his powerful gaze on her stubborn lashes. As he hoped, she raised startled eyes in which an angry glitter dawned.
"My dearest wish? If I had one should I tell you? Why do you ask me such a question?"
"Because I lit a candle at the Mission to-day that you might realize it," he answered, smiling.
To his surprise he saw a flash of terror in her eyes before she dropped them, and felt her shiver.
But she answered coldly:
"You have wasted a candle, senor. I have never had a wish that was not instantly gratified. But I thank you for the kind thought. Will you finish this waltz with my friend, and the fiancee of Luis, Rafaella Sal? She has quarrelled with Luis, I see;
Don Weeliam is dancing with Carolina Xime'no, and she cares to waltz with no one else. Pardon me if I say that no one has ever waltzed as well as your excellency, and I must not be selfish."
"I will release you if you are tired, but otherwise I shall do myself the honor to waltz with your friend later."
"I must look after my other guests," she said coldly; and he was led with what grace he could summon to the fair but sulky Rafaella.
"How am I to help flirting with that girl?" he thought as he mechanically guided another light and graceful partner through the crowded room. "If she were one girl I might resist. But since eleven o'clock yesterday morning she has been three. And if she was twenty yesterday, twelve this morning, she is twenty-eight to-night, and this might be a court ball in Madrid. I shall leave the day after I bring the Governor to terms."
He sat beside Dona Ignacia during the contra-danza and found the scene remarkably brilliant and animated considering the primitive conditions. In addition to the bright flags on the wall and the vivid colors of the women, the officers of the Presidio and forts wore full dress uniform, either white coats with red velvet vest, red pantaloons and sash, or white trousers and scarlet coat and waistcoat faced with green. The young men from the Mission wore small clothes of a black silk, fastened at the knee with silver buckles, and white silk stockings; two gentlemen from Monterey wore the evening costume of the capital, dove-colored small clothes, with white silk waistcoat and stockings, and much fine lawn and lace. The room was well lighted by many wicks stuck in lumps of tallow. The Indian musi-cians, soldiers recruited from a superior tribe in the Santa Clara valley, were clad almost entirely in scarlet, and danced sometimes as they played; and Indian girls, in short red skirts and snow-white smocks open at the throat, their long hair decorated with flowers and ribbons, already passed about wine and dulces. The windows were open. The sweet night air blew in.
The contra-danza was not unlike the square dances of England except that it was far more graceful, and the men rivalled the women in their supple glidings and bendings, doublings and sway-ings. Concha danced with Ignacio Sal, Rafaella with William Sturgis; their pliant grace, as facile as grain rippling before the wind, would have put the best ballet in Europe to the blush. Concha's skirts swept Rezanov's feet, her little slippers twinkled before his admiring eyes, and he lost no sinuous turn or undulation of her beautiful figure; but she never vouchsafed him a glance.
When the dance finished his host introduced him to the prettiest of the girls and he paid them as many compliments as their heads would stand. He even took some trouble to talk to them, if only to fathom the sources of their unlikeness to Concha Arguello.
He concluded that the gulf that separated her from these charming, vivacious, shallow young girls was not dug by education alone. Individualities were rare enough in Europe; out here, in earthly, but sparsely settled paradises, they must be rarer still; but that one had wandered into the lovely shell of Concha Arguello he no longer doubted. The fact that it had developed haphazardly, with little or no help from her sentience, and was still fluid and un-certain, but multiplied her in interest and charm.
The women to whom he was accustomed knew themselves, consequently were no riddle to a man of his experience, but here he had an odd sense of hav-ing entered into a compact in the dark with a girl who might one day symbolize some high and im-passioned ideal he had cherished in the days before ideals had been cast aside with the negative virtues that bred them.
As he coolly studied the good looks of the young caballeros and the plain intellectual face and slight little figure of the Bostonian, noted the utter in-difference with which they were treated by the Favorita of Presidio and Mission, he felt a sudden rush of arrogance, a youthful tingling of nerves, the same prophetic sense of imminent happiness and power that his first contact with the light electrical air and the beauty of the country had induced.
After all, he was but forty-two. Life on the whole had been very kind to him. And, although he did not realize it as yet, his frame, blighted by the rigors of the past three years, was already sensible to a renewal of juice and sap. He admitted that he was more interested than he had been for many years, and that if he was not in love, he tingled with a very natural masculine desire for an adventure with a pretty girl.
But he was by no means a weak man, and his mind counted the cost even while his imagination hummed. He had almost decided to bid Dona Ignacia an abrupt good-night, pleading fatigue, which his pallor indorsed, when the door of the din-ing-room was thrown open to the liveliest of fiddling, and a white hand with a singular sugges-tion of tenacity both in appearance and clasp took possession of his arm.
"My mother has gone to Gertrudis Rudisinda, who is crying," said Concha. "It is my pleasure to lead your excellency in to supper."
